Thor said:
...Another thing that struck me was Laura's post yesterday about getting enough foundation vegetables. I have not been eating very many foundation vegetables and upon rereading the Induction part of TNAFANY I realized that they are important in getting the digestion to transition. So yesterday I started introducing more foundation vegetables and will see how that goes...
Be careful with the veggies, though. As uncomfortable as I have been this last month, one thing I did NOT have to deal with was the abrasion caused by excess "roughage" in my diet. This can be quite damaging, and can lead to serious disease as described in
Fiber Menace. So while things have been moving slowly (improving now), they have nevertheless been moving smoothly and there have been no incidents of hard, dry stool. I have not had that particular problem now for 5 months, since I greatly lowered my dietary fiber.
I feel strongly, based on present knowledge, that a neo-paleo, ketogenic diet is the best way to go for people that are able to adopt it. What I am not so sure of is whether my GI tract can heal enough for me to do that personally. The books where I have been reading about ketogenic diets have not generally included much if any discussion about neo-paleo eating. It is necessary to read widely and to draw from a variety of sources to fill in the gaps.
And it's complicated. I had a long talk with our veterinarian last week about our cats' diet. While she is herself a vegetarian, our vet at least acknowledges that cats are carnivores. She is open-minded and favors nutritional interventions over drugs and such -- I would like to find a personal MD like that -- and she has learned quite a lot about the animals she treats. She points out that the natural diet of cats living in the wild includes the intestines of their prey, and that
that is where they get their vegetables, pre-digested. As for "fiber," in the wild they would be ingesting fur, bone bits, and such that serve a parallel purpose in carnivores. Domestic cats are different, but how, exactly? Simply eliminating "modern" veggies from the diet of modern domestic cats doesn't work. I hope you see the parallel with modern domestic humans, though I think we, as a unique form of medium-sized omnivore that cooks its food, are more adaptable.
This conversation came about because in reading the labels of packaged cat foods I kept coming across grains, primarily rice but also millet and others, as the second ingredient. Some high-priced "healthy, organic" cat foods are much worse, formulated apparently only to satisfy the narcissistic needs of clueless vegetarian/vegan cat owners (thankfully, they don't seem to sell all that well). Our cats are having trouble with their appetites and they show signs of other "diseases of civilization" and we have been trying to figure out what to feed them. In some ways, because of their shorter lives, they are leading the way helping us to figure out what to change in our own diets -- but at their expense!
And so I think (based on what I know -- always subject to revision) that we need to understand how to replace problematic veggies with less problematic foods as part of a neo-paleo diet. I don't know how. The eggshell idea might be one good example of the possibilities, but what else can we do? I think there may have been some discussion about this in this topic or elsewhere but if so, I have lost track of it.
